"Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern"
Alfred North Whitehead

picked up from a Donald Richie's book

"Having been totally absorbed in Tales, I knew scarcely anyone except the people I used to visit in order to borrow books."

Lady Sarashina, XI century

“Shamanesses do tend to go from being strictly mediums into being prostitutes as well. The state of inspiration itself is intensely physical, heightening a person’s sensuality to the furthest degree (unlike intellectual labor, which diminishes sexuality) so that the body of a medium in a trance comes to seem the very incarnation of sex ( Read more... )

“In his eyes, the poet Goethe was even greater than the poet Christ”

which tells us even more about Gorkiy!

breakfast: Japanese Gardens
commuting, northbound: Kurosawa's autobiography
commuting, southbound: The Casual Vacancy
in bed: Japanese Gardens

Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927) had an affair with “Crazy Girl” Hide Shigeko (1890-1973) and a near-affair with “Woman of Hokuriku” Katayama Hiroko (1878-1957)

“The street was no more than three blocks long, but in the time it took me to cover that distance, the same dog passed by me four separate times”
(“Spinning Gears”)

4 stands for death, see Tetraphobia

Dazai’s wife has revealed that her husband dictated “Heed My Plea” to her orally at one sitting early in their marriage - without pausing to choose his words, either.Judas on the Apostles: “They are completely taken in by this mad notion of a heaven, and every one of them will want to be some sort of royal minister as the day of the kingdom draws ( Read more... )

"Why the literature of mid-Heian should have been dominated by women is another problem that exercises the scholars. Possibly it has something to do with the fact that Japan seems to have been relatively free of the harem politics that so beset other Oriental countries, and talented ladies of leisure therefore found other outlets for their energies ( Read more... )

"the fuss made about the seasons
Japan has four separate and distinct seasons, I was forever being told. Well, so does Ohio, I was tempted to answer, and then I remembered that there we only mentioned the seasons to complain about them, that we rarely celebrated them for their own transient sakes."